Horizontal line with gradient color

[awells12]

Is there a way to insert a horizontal line into a page layout with a gradient color? I'm trying to replicate the headers of the Word documents we use and they include a orange-to-white gradient horizontal line. I can copy the plain orange line into Flare but the part of the line begins to fade into white appears to be a separate element and just shows up as a white (or invisible) line with no gradient. Is there a way to create this kind of horizontal line in Flare short of just taking a screenshot of the line in Word?

[Nita Beck]

(I'm going on memory, so bear with me here... And I haven't tested this, so YMMV.)

I don't think you can do this with Flare directly, but I'm fairly certain you can do this with MadCap Capture. Create a new Capture file, one that has a white (or blank) background image of even just 4x4 pixels... that bit doesn't matter. But in the Capture file, draw a long horizontal line of the desired width and set its color to have a starting color and ending color, to make the gradient. If you can't do a line that way, make a long, skinny rectangle, again with a starting color and ending color. Don't give it a border at all. Save this image.

Then in Flare, insert that image into your page layout. I'm not at all certain whether you can make the line bleed off the page.

[kwag_myers]

Is there a way to create this kind of horizontal line in Flare short of just taking a screenshot of the line in Word?

I tried using linear-gradient(orange, white) in the background property of a paragraph style, but it doesn't work with print outputs (looks nice in html, though). I think your best option is to, as you say, take a screen-shot and insert it as an image.

[awells12]

I inserted the line as a screenshot and that worked well, but now I'm running into another problem. I want the line to extend across the entire width of the page, so I dragged the ends of the header frame to the edges of the page and indented the text accordingly. Everything looks correct in the page layout editor, but the actual Word output still appears to have the same header width as before, so the line doesn't extend across the page and the newly-indented text is now indented further than it should be. Also, the line looks a lot skinnier in the Word output.

[kwag_myers]

All I can say is that I've yet to read a post in this forum from someone who was pleasantly impressed with Flare's Word output. Most users who need a Word output on a regular basis find it easier to generate a PDF, and from that convert to Word in Acrobat.

[awells12]

Everything looks correct in the PDF output so that may have to be the way to go (I even noticed some unwanted borders in my header and footer frame that weren't showing up in the Word output). Thanks for your help, everyone!